Believed to have inspired the mythical Bali Hai from James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, Moorea is one of the most scenically striking islands in French Polynesia. The island is roughly shaped like a heart from overhead, with the northern shore split into two symmetrical bays, Cook’s and Opunohu Bay, and Mount Rotui standing sentinel…
Continue reading →“The first experience can never be repeated. That first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a virginity of sense.” ~Robert Louis Stevenson This was Stevenson’s impression upon first alighting in the South Pacific in June of 1888. A lot has changed…or maybe not. Bora Bora is now…
Continue reading →Raitea is the second largest of the Society Islands, after Tahiti, in French Polynesia. It’s name means “faraway heaven”, and rightly so with its green-carpeted mountains, cascading waterfalls, crystalline waters, and the beautiful Tiare apetahi, a white corolla-petaled flower so rare it can be grown no place else on earth. The port is in Utoroa,…
Continue reading →To me, one of the great experiences of cruising is living on the ship. It is a luxuriously contained world and everyone is pretty much there for the same reasons, mostly to ensure a good time. An advantage to a very long cruise is that you establish very good friends with which to have a…
Continue reading →Arriving at Pago Pago felt a bit like an early homecoming, as it is the capital city of American Samoa, a territory of the US since 1900. English is spoken along with native Samoan, and the local currency is the good ole’ US dollar. The territory is made up of five volcanic islands totaling 76…
Continue reading →Tonga, the Pacific’s only remaining kingdom, is perched just east of the International Dateline and is made up of more than 170 tropical Pacific islands, most uninhabited. The entire population is about 105,000 with almost 70 percent living in the capital city of Nuku’alofa on the main island of Tongatapu. We arrived at the capital…
Continue reading →Cruise ships suffer no lack of activities to keep their passengers busy whether it is with enrichment lectures, cooking demonstrations, wine and spirit tastings, art and dance classes, games, tea time, spa treatments, fitness exercises, bridge lessons, and on and on. The staff will do almost anything to keep us entertained. So to occupy us…
Continue reading →Rough seas and stormy weather forced us to skip our next port of Tauranga, New Zealand, so we spent the extra day at sea and headed on to Auckland, where we were greeted by scattered clouds and intermittent autumn showers, but looking forward to some old and some new sights. We were thankful for the…
Continue reading →On the east coast of New Zealand’s north island, the port of Napier, with its vast timber export industry, is in the heart of sunny Hawke’s Bay, the second largest wine region in the country, though when we arrived the weather was cloudy and drizzling. Napier, the Art Deco capital of New Zealand with a…
Continue reading →Some places you can’t get enough of. So, we were really excited to return to New Zealand where Dean and I had spent a couple of weeks in 2009, working our way from the bottom of the south island to the top of the north, weaving in and out of towns, cities, countryside, wineries. We…
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